The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

Film: The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden, Tuesday Weld, Joan Blondell, Rip Torn

Director: Norman Jewison

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Steve McQueen: click here to learn more about Mr. McQueen (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Steve McQueen is a weird star persona today.  In his era, McQueen was a big name, one of the biggest in movies, but because of a combination of factors (movies that aren't entirely in the modern zeitgeist, as well as his estate limiting his visage in merchandise after death), he's not remembered in the same way as other stars of his era.  James Dean died younger, Elvis Presley was more ubiquitous, Robert Redford & Paul Newman lived longer and were therefore able to make movies with men like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, & Chris Evans (i.e. the next generations of action heroes).  McQueen is remembered today by pop culture for Bullitt, being really cool, and dying young.  But he made a comparable amount of hits to Redford & Newman, and certainly more than Dean or Presley and he started it earlier in his career.  While he spent most of the 1950's doing television, theater, and B-movies (like The Blob), a chance skirmish in the Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra essentially fired Sammy Davis, Jr. from working on Never So Few after they had a fight) gave McQueen the chance to really prove his worth, nearly stealing the picture from Sinatra.  The following few years included some massive hits, all led by McQueen, including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and The Carpetbaggers, a now-forgotten sudser that was the #4 film of 1964, behind certified icons of the year Mary Poppins, Goldfinger, & My Fair Lady.  All of this is to say that by 1965, when McQueen was leading an all-star cast of Old & New Hollywood figures, he was already one of the definitive actors of the decade.

(Spoilers Ahead) Despite its name evoking a gangster picture, The Cincinnati Kid is not an actual action film (we'll get into a few of those to match our monthly theme with McQueen in the coming weeks).  The film is about The Kid (McQueen), a dynamite poker player who is tired of playing big games around New Orleans, and wants to move up in the ranks, potentially even moving to Miami, but knows he needs to beat Lancey (Robinson), the greatest poker player in the city, first.  The film's first half really focuses on the lead up to this, with Lancey clearly threatened by the Kid potentially coming for his throne, while the Kid's relationship with his best friend Shooter (Malden) and his girlfriend Christian (Weld) are thrown asunder, particularly as Shooter is blackmailed by local mobster Slade (Torn) into trying to fix the match for the Kid.  The film's most famous scenes are in the back half of the movie, when we see an aggressive, long-stakes game of poker between the Kid & Lancey, along with a host of other characters, most colorfully Joan Blondell as a boozy gambling diva named Lady Fingers.  The movie ends with Lancey once again beating the Kid, proving that youth and his cool demeanor are not enough to dethrone the champ.

The film's ending is maybe the most interesting part of the picture.  The entire high-stakes game is really something, and genuinely (and surprisingly, for a sports film) thrilling to see who might win.  It's pretty clear that so many of the side characters, especially Slade & Shooter's lusty wife Melba (Ann-Margret) want the Kid to win, which in movie language means that he won't, but the idea of the villainous older guy needing to make way for a new generation is also a trope of this genre that is ignored.  The ending also differs depending on the cut you see.  The one I saw was not what director Norman Jewison wanted.  He wanted a much more dour ending, with the Kid losing a game of penny-pitching against a kid who has been trying to beat him all film, ending with another shocking defeat for our leading man.  Instead, we get a more conventional ending with McQueen & Weld embracing, her forgiving him for having slept with Ann-Margret a few minutes earlier.

The movie's script needs tightening in this regard, but I get why this became storied in the world of poker, as it glamorizes the skill needed to make it in the world of poker, and the badass nature of it.  Most of the young cast is really hot, sexy cool spilling out from every corner of the film, including the end credits with a sleek, jazzy song by Ray Charles.  This might not shock people reading this about, say, McQueen or Ann-Margret or Tuesday Weld, but modern audiences will shocked to be reminded that Rip Torn at one point was a total Chad.  I can't quite put my finger on what might improve this film (one wonders if Karl Malden was miscast...you could see this part being played better by, say, Gene Hackman a couple of years later, and I say this as someone who generally likes Karl Malden), but most of it's great, including Robinson in one of his last roles, and Blondell totally stealing the picture.  As for McQueen-he plays this placid, unflappable, introverted character so well it makes sense it would become his go to for much of his career.

OVP: Thunderball (1965)

Film: Thunderball (1965)

Stars: Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi, Rik van Nutter

Director: Terence Young

Oscar History: 1 nod/1 win (Best Visual Effects*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Our shift from Errol Flynn to Sean Connery in part also shifts us into the modern definition of an action star, and in some ways we should've gone with our next two month's stars (who are far more focused on the 1970's, but wouldn't have much legacy as action stars in the blockbuster sense beyond that), except that if we're going chronologically Connery became famous first.  He also just managed to live long enough as an action star to become a leading man alongside the heyday of the genre in the 1980's & 90's.

But we are shifting into Connery because he defined action in the 1960's, and he did so as the quintessential movie hero: James Bond.  While Bond was originally a book character, in a highly-popular spy series by Ian Fleming (which would eventually have every single novel be brought to the big-screen), Connery's inhabitation of it would make it an essentially cinema-derived product to the minds of billions.  Connery got the role of Bond pretty early in his career.  He was a leading man at that point, having appeared in Darby O'Gill and the Little People (a live-action Disney movie), but he had not had a traditional breakthrough, which would change with the colossal success of Dr. No.  The film would make Connery a household name, but as we'll find in the coming weeks, it was more Bond that would be the household name than Connery himself.

(Spoilers Ahead) Connery would make seven Bond films in his career, and I had before this just seen two (Dr. No and Goldfinger).  We're only going to do one Bond film this month (there's a lot to Connery's career that I want to cover so we won't have time for more), and I didn't want it to be one of his post-1960's pictures, so I kind of just drew a name out of a hat and went with Thunderball (both because of its Oscar win and because I love that Tom Jones theme song).  This film won Bond his first (and to date only) Visual Effects Oscar, and is a story about Bond once again taking on SPECTRE, this time with their #2 leader Emilio Largo (Celi), who is planning on destroying a major US or UK city unless their governments pay him 100 million pounds.  Connery eventually starts to infiltrate the spy's den, all the while bedding a half dozen women, including those closest to Largo, before eventually defeating him with the help of the curvaceous & stylish (seriously, that black-and-white bikini could make a comeback so fast on Instagram if someone wanted to bring it back) Domino, played by Auger.

The movie is not one of Bond's most-celebrated outings, and many clock this as the first weak link in the Connery era of films, generally considered the best until Daniel Craig, and they're right.  Connery is still there, charming and brutishly sexy as ever (the film's now heavily-criticized sexual politics have a cringe moment early on when Connery toes the line with Molly Peters' physiotherapist, eventually having sex with her despite protestations earlier in a steam room), but there's not enough to do.  The biggest problem is that there are too many women in this (I know that's opening up for ridicule as a gay man saying it, but it's true)-they feel frequently interchangeable and none of them stand out.  This film would be remade in 1983 in Connery's final Bond film (Never Say Never Again), and Domino would be played by future Oscar winner Kim Basinger, so I'm curious when I eventually get to that (not for this series, but in terms of Bond completionism) if it'll be better.

I do want to talk about the visual effects before we go, since this is a big Oscar blog, and I'd be remiss if I ignored them.  I think the effects are impressive-the opening sequence with Connery using a jet pack is crazy (it actually worked), and the underwater fights and the explosions later in the picture are top-notch.  I have to assume it was the underwater photography that got it the win though, given how revolutionary it looks.  I've seen a film like Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, which was a CinemaScope spectacle 12 years earlier starring Robert Wagner & Terry Moore, and it was considered revolutionary at the time (it even got nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars) in the way that it shot underwater so well in color, but 12 years later, Thunderball is on another level.  This looks like it was shot with green screens it's that impressive, and is a real step up compared to anything you'd see of this nature, likely inspiring everything in the future from Jaws to Titanic.

Mickey One (1965)

Film: Mickey One (1965)

Stars: Warren Beatty, Alexandra Stewart, Hurd Hatfield, Franchot Tone, Kamatari Fujiwara

Director: Arthur Penn

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

We have not yet done an English language film from the neo-noir era this year, and since we are officially at the end of the month (this is our final film-thanks for following along!), I'm going to get one in under the buzzer.  Mickey One, though, doesn't feel particularly American.  Made in 1965 for Columbia, it starred a big name in Hollywood at the time, albeit one that wasn't as big as he would be two years later.  Warren Beatty, along with his director from this picture Arthur Penn, would redefine Hollywood movies two years later with Bonnie and Clyde, but Mickey One is barely discussed today, and it's honestly more akin to the French New Wave than the other American movies of its era, even other neo-noir of the early-to-mid-1960's.  The film is at once ahead of its time, and perhaps also, not of any time, it's such an oddity in the noir genre.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is narratively about Mickey One (Beatty), a standup comic who has made the mafia angry, though it's not entirely clear why (this becomes a key point in a scene later in the picture where Beatty argues with Oscar nominee Franchot Tone, this being his penultimate big-screen role).  He moves to Chicago, and there he falls in love with a woman named Jenny (Stewart), but is afraid of being too successful as a comic under an assumed name, realizing that if he becomes well-known the mafia will come after him.  He fouls up an audition arranged for him by a talent scout of sorts (played by Hurd Hatfield), mostly because he's too scared of the man behind the light, thinking that he's trying to kill him.  The film ends with him finally giving up, realizing that he can't run forever, so he might as well at least try to make his act a success again.

That's the plot of the movie, but it's not really the driving force behind it.  Penn's picture is roughly edited, frequently splicing together scenes in a seemingly intentional manner (given that Penn would make a movie as fine as Bonnie and Clyde, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that this was a stylistic choice rather than just bad editing), and feels like it's supposed to be ambiguous.  There are aspects of this I like.  I loved the way that we get a French New Wave film by way of Fellini (Kamatari Fujiwara plays a modernist sculptor that would've felt very much at home in Nights of Cabiria or 8 1/2), and I think it smartly plays into the paranoia that would be mined so well in the 1970's in movies like Chinatown and Penn's own Night Moves (maybe the two best neo-noirs of the decade?), showing that you can't trust anyone, even if in the case of Mickey One, it's not clear if anyone is out to get you.  It looks good (solid cinematography), and I loved the jazzy soundtrack.

But while there are a lot of good ideas on display here, the film itself does not gel.  This is blasphemy coming from me as I love him as an actor, but Warren Beatty is maybe miscast?  He's too beautiful, and he's not a particularly funny comic (it's not clear if he's supposed to be talented or not, which is a problem for the story), and he doesn't inhabit the paranoia in the way that someone like his buddy Jack Nicholson would've at the time.  I feel like he gets lost in the movie, and while he looks the part of a French New Wave leading man, it doesn't work.  None of the performances are that strong, though, to be honest.  Hurd Hatfield is the best, but I don't think he knows what his part is supposed to be, and the sexual tension between he and Beatty feels wasted (it's possible Penn never even noticed it).  Critics at the time called the film pretentious, and honestly-they're not wrong, even if time would show that Penn had good ideas, but he wouldn't be able to hone them until he had seen an America ripped apart by Vietnam and Watergate.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Caught, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Side Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach, A Woman's Secret

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Big Knife, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, Kansas City Confidential, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps, Whirlpool

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai, Shoot the Piano Player

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Film: For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Stars: Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte, Mario Brega, Luigi Pistilli

Director: Sergio Leone

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Clint Eastwood: click here to learn more about Mr. Eastwood (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the early-1960's, Clint Eastwood's career was at a unique stage.  Rawhide had given him a platform & a stardom, but it was still in television, and Eastwood had his sights set on movies.  By the 1960's, though, most of the biggest western stars of the previous era (John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper) were either dead or on their way out of the genre, and New Hollywood didn't have a lot of interest (yet) in where the western was going.  So Eastwood headed down an unusual path, going to Italy to make a low-budget western that would change his life, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.  The film was not just a surprise box office smash, it briefly created a new genre of movies.  The 1960's would be dominated by the somewhat pejoratively named "spaghetti westerns," westerns filmed in Italy, usually dubbed from the original Italian for English release, and featuring a similar plotline of a stranger coming to town and turning out an evil.  The most famous of these movies was the Dollars Trilogy, which we're on the second one of this week.  For a Few Dollars More was an even bigger hit than its predecessor (something that was a lot rarer in the 1960's than it would become in the 1980's and later when VHS and video rental places allowed for a film's audience to grow between filming sequels), and cemented Eastwood as the biggest box office draw in Italy.  Next week, we'll talk a bit more about how Eastwood used his success in these movies to eventually become a name in Hollywood movies, but first, let's discuss the movie that is oftentimes forgotten in discussions of the trilogy, though after watching...I have no idea why.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is considered part of a trilogy, but it's not really a sequel in the traditional sense as while many of the actors from A Fistful of Dollars are in this movie, they are playing different parts.  Eastwood inhabits the "man with no name" persona again, here nicknamed Manco, and initiallly he is in something of a turf war with Colonel Mortimer (van Cleef), as both are noted bounty hunters who come to realize they're after the same man, El Indio (Volonte), a ruthless bandit, thief, & murderer, who carries around the musical pocket watch of a woman he raped who killed herself during the act we later discover.  After a fantastic showdown (which involves both men shooting each other's hats in a metaphorical dick-measuring contest), the two join sides, content to get the nearly $40,000 that would come with taking down El Indio's gang.  Initially they infiltrate him by having Manco join the gang, but once he's found out, this sets up a showdown between the three men, and us understanding that the woman whom El Indio raped was Mortimer's sister, and he had done this not for money, but for vengeance.

The movie doesn't have the scrappiness of A Fistful of Dollars.  Shot for a considerably larger budget (purportedly double the original's), it shows.  The cinematography, which in the original is excellent but scrappy, expands into gorgeous vistas, and the set design is magnificent, us getting to see these recreations in the real world rather than just on a studio lot.  The music from Ennio Morricone is marvelous, another absolute gem of a score, here a bit more melodic & less recurring than A Fistful of Dollars.  Even the acting is better here than the original.  Eastwood feels more at-home in this character, deprived of some of the stress of carrying the picture (and the main character's enigma) by himself with van Cleef very strong as his right-hand man.  Like Eastwood, van Cleef had spent much of the 1960's working in different bit parts in Hollywood (he had a non-speaking part in High Noon) before doing a number of guest spots on western shows of the era like The Rifleman, Have Gun-Will Travel, & Maverick.  This film revitalized his career, making him a huge name in Italy, and he spent much of the remainder of the 1960's & 1970's doing westerns, most of them in Europe.

The only thing that I think maybe it feels inferior to the original on is the story structure.  The movie has a lot of side plots, and is less focused than A Fistful of Dollars.  In some ways this is okay (Leone's magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in the West, is also a movie that as four separate plot lines converging into one gigantic showdown).  But this one doesn't do a good enough job of differentiating them.  It feels, quite frankly, like it functions better if you think of it as a series of western motifs rather than something that should be considered brilliantly plotted.  It still has great dialogue, and I like it a lot if you think of it as an homage to the western rather than one that should be taken literally, but if we're going to split hairs between two masterworks of the genre...that's where I'd land.

Those Calloways (1965)

Film: Those Calloways (1965)

Stars: Brian Keith, Vera Miles, Brandon deWilde, Walter Brennan, Ed Wynn, Linda Evans

Director: Norman Tokar

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Walter Brennan: click here to learn more about Mr. Brennan (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Walter Brennan's career is pretty vast & as a result we're going to skip some chapters in it in part because I've seen them (look at something like the western classic Rio Bravo, which we examined last month for Ward Bond), but between 1947 (where we left off last week) and 1965, Brennan's career continued to thrive.  One of the most successful character actors of the Classical Hollywood era (which he'd live long enough to see the beginning & end of), he spent much of the 1950's working in westerns, playing opposite big stars like Jimmy Stewart & Spencer Tracy.  In 1957, though, Brennan (who had been courted for a while to consider television) finally relented to the small screen despite not really needing to (he was working regularly in movies), and took on the leading role of Grandpa Amos McCoy in The Real McCoys.  Though Brennan had occasionally gotten top billing in B-Movies, this was his first really big hit where he got to be the headliner.  The Real McCoys would be one of the most successful television shows of its era, being in the Top 15 highest-rated programs for most of its run.  But Brennan would continue working during & even after The Real McCoys, making today's film Those Calloways for Disney two years after The Real McCoys went off the air.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about the Calloways, including father Cam (Keith), mother Liddy (Miles), and their son Bucky (deWilde) who live in the middle of backwoods Vermont in the 1920's, and are considered unusual by the townspeople.  They live with a crow and a black bear cub as pets, and Cam is obsessed with the geese that fly by each year, who are friendly with the American Indian tribe the MicMac's, whom Cam is friends with and is seen as an "honorary" member of their tribe (yes, this is one of the Disney+ movies with a warning label, though as far as western treatment of American Indians, Disney committed far greater sins in other movies).  A traveling salesman, though, sees the potential for the geese to become a hunting tourism destination, and despite the protestations of both the Calloways, as well as some of their friends, particularly Alf Simes (Brennan) and Ed Parker (Wynn), much of the town is onboard with the hunting destination to bring in new revenue...until a gun accident causes Cam to nearly die defending the geese.  After this, they decide to preserve the geese marshland & help the Calloways in their conservationist efforts.

The movie has a lot more story than just that, for the record, but much of it is superfluous.  I generally like this type of Disney movie, even when I don't like it if that makes sense.  Everything is relatively low stakes (unless you're an animal, then good luck, as this has a dog nearly killed by a wolverine), and it's very of-the-moment.  This type of Disney film would barely exist before the 1960's and would become totally out-of-fashion by the late 1970's, becoming pretty much a byproduct of the Disney anthology series (currently called The Wonderful World of Disney) which would see its heyday during this time frame since it was hosted by Walt Disney himself.  The films are fun, and have a loveliness that feels like it's trading on memories of your childhood even when you don't know the movie by heart...it works.

But it's not a good movie, and honestly would've made a better miniseries as there's too much story here, and much of it is shortchanged.  Vera Miles' character is always fussing about, and there are moments where she cries that feel totally unearned.  We see way too little of Brandon deWilde, in pure heartthrob mode (I pity the poor young gay men that watched this movie and got lost in his blond good looks while having to pretend to be enamored with a young Linda Evans), as his romance gets shortchanged.  The best parts of the movie are Brennan & Wynn, in the twilight of their impressive careers, trading jokes & playing on their screen personas without adding much to the actual film.

Brennan's TV career brought about some unusual success for him.  He became, inexplicably, a Billboard artist in 1962 with the release of the song "Old Rivers," which peaked at #5 on the charts, and was followed by a second hit "Mama Sang a Song" later that year (at the age of 67, Brennan was at the time the oldest person ever to chart on the Billboards, and even today where pop acts tour forever the idea of someone eligible for Social Security competing against Dua Lipa & L'il Nas X on the charts is unthinkable).  Brennan would continue working throughout the rest of his life, working on a couple of Disney projects before dying of emphysema in 1974 at the age of 80.  Next month, we're going to switch away from character actors to a woman who definitely headlined movies throughout the 1940's, including one masterpiece of the era, but who would become synonymous (for the good and the bad) with her hit 1950's television series that set the standard for Eisenhower Era domesticity.

OVP: Marriage Italian-Style (1964)

Film: Marriage-Italian Style (1964)
Stars: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni
Director: Vittorio de Sica
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Sophia Loren, Foreign Language Film-Italy...though they were in different years; this is one of roughly a dozen foreign language films to get their FF nomination in a different year than one of their other nominations, though this is the truly rare time where the FF nod came after the acting nomination, as it was usually the other way around)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Sophia Loren-click here to learn more about Ms. Loren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I'm aware that we're now moving into our second film with Loren & Mastroianni (and our third where she's directed by Vittorio de Sica), which might feel a bit repetitive when it comes to Loren's career.  But while Loren was making movies of this era in the United States, most notably The Fall of the Roman Empire (for which she became the second-ever actress to receive a $1 million paycheck, after Elizabeth Taylor for Cleopatra), these weren't where she was getting the most creative juice.  Loren was oftentimes just asked to be unattainable & beautiful in American films, but it was in Italian cinema like Two Women and Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow that she was getting critical hosannas & working on movies that would be more lasting to her legacy (and thus more interesting in a retrospective of her work).  Marriage-Italian Style was also important to Loren's career because it was her second (and to-date, last) Oscar nomination, so missing it feels a bit of a miss considering we're only going to be profiling two Oscar-nominated actresses this entire season.  With that caveat, let's move into Marriage-Italian Style

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about the complicated romance between Domenico (Mastroianni), a cruel, successful businessman who has a penchant for prostitutes, and a prostitute he becomes infatuated with named Filumena (Loren).  The two start a decades long affair, with her eventually taking on more traditional roles similar to a wife, such as caring for his dying mother & helping run his shops, but never actually becoming his wife-he uses her, she puts up with it because she's in love with him & doesn't feel she can do better.  When he decides to actually marry a younger girl who works in his shop, Filumena fakes her own deathbed to convince him to marry her, and it works-she marries him, and in the best scene of the movie, reveals her plan to him (while contemptuously eating a plate of pasta).  As he tries to annul the marriage, she reveals another secret to him-she has three sons (proving that he's been away from her for extended periods of his life), only one of which is his, and she wants nothing in terms of money, but wants her sons to have his name, so that she can be acknowledged as their mother.

The film is weird, because in the first half, it's lensed as kind of a comic play, climaxing in the reveal of the deathbed hoax.  It also doesn't really work-Domenico is too much of an asshole for us to really care or even ever forgive him for what he did to Filumena, and part of me was hoping that he wouldn't so easily wriggle out of the marriage (even though eventually he'd get married to Filumena for real).  The tone of the film is also weird because the first seven minutes are told before a flashback, and are so somber you also would be confused about the tone of the film.  This makes this film feel sloppy in a way that neither of our two other entries with de Sica & Loren did, and makes this my least favorite of the three.

The movie works better as a drama, where Filumena & Domenico have to acknowledge their age and the failed nature of their relationship in order to find some sort of solace with their children.  This doesn't necessarily make for better acting (I feel like Loren is too reliant on madonna/whore tropes in this role, and doesn't have the nuance of Yesterday or the dramatic heft of Two Women, though she's still eminently watchable & nails that reveal scene so beautifully you'd be forgiven for not remembering anything else), but it makes for a more grounded, straight-forward script, which is what Marriage Italian-Style is in need of in order to figure out its purpose.

Next week, we're going to go later into Loren's career and talk about what happened after she moved beyond her peak fame in the 1960's, to a film made after de Sica's death, with the concluding review devoted to our August star.